


Roses and Ruin

by DesperateJoys



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Drug Abuse, Endgame Clint Barton/Phil Coulson, Fix-It, Happy Ending, Minor Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Multi, Pre-Canon, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:20:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2264286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesperateJoys/pseuds/DesperateJoys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heroes always come with stories.  It's practically part of the job requirement.  But the stories that matter aren't the ones that adoring fans ever hear.  This is a collection of stories, really more like snapshots, about two mostly unknown heroes, Clint Barton and Phil Coulson, and the people who helped define their lives and watched them find, lose, and then find each other again.  (For two very smart people, they can be a little slow - their friends sometimes help with that and sometimes just make it worse.)  The course of life is never smooth, but sometimes it has what qualifies as happy endings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I'll Circle 'Round You, If You Will Circle 'Round Me

**Author's Note:**

> This is currently a work in great progress. I have most of the (approximately 32) chapters roughly planned, but some are resisting being written more than others. Since I had the first couple of chapters finished already, I decided to go ahead and post them for more motivation. Unfortunately, this story has no outline schedule, since I'd like to be able to upload the chapters in order rather than as they're finished. Although each chapter is connected, only some of them are particularly crucial to the plot. If an individual chapter's warnings freak you out, feel free to skip it. It shouldn't cause a huge amount of confusion. 
> 
> The entire story spans years and contains flashbacks and flashforwards, although the chapters are roughly in chronological order after the first one, which serves as an introduction. If anyone totally loses the plot, please let me know, since I may need to move some chapters around. This is somewhat of an experiment in format for me, so I'm playing with it to see how it goes.
> 
> Each chapter is inspired one or multiple songs that reminded me of one of the characters or of the relationships. I'll have the title and artist listed in each chapter if anyone wants to recreate my Spotify playlist. Hope you enjoy!

 

Every story has a beginning and an ending – that’s just common sense.  For true stories, the problem comes in trying to fix those points in time.  Does a story start at birth?  At a particularly important moment?  Does it end at death?  We struggle to tell our own stories because we can’t always recognize the beginnings and are incapable of seeing the end.  Perhaps the best we can do is carve out chunks of time that define us, moments in which we changed, and hope that some small sense of the true meaning is communicated in the telling.  Far more often, it is others we have left behind who must tell our stories in our stead.

* * *

 

“Do you think we’ll still be alive when they finally tear it down?”

The air was just the wrong side of chilly to be perfectly comfortable and the wind was sharp enough that all the other people in Central Park, tourists and New Yorkers alike, didn’t stop to linger, some stopping to gaze at the statue for a moment before hurrying on to somewhere warmer.  None of them spared a second glance for the carefully nondescript man and woman sitting on a nearby bench in what had been a companionable silence.  The woman tilted her head slightly, red hair barely visible under a hat, as she considered the stone monument in front of her.

“Would it really matter if we were?” she replied softly.  “It’s not like it ever really had anything to do with us.”

Her companion shrugged broad shoulders, but didn’t turn his head. 

“Just strange to think about, I guess.  That we’d still be here when no one remembered or cared anymore.”

“They never remembered the things that mattered in the first place.  They couldn’t – that’s not what this is about.  It’s a monument to The Avengers, not to the people.”

The two fell silent, lost in their own thoughts and memories.

“It should never have worked, you know,” she said suddenly.  “The six of us.  We were more likely to destroy the world than to save it.”

“But it did work,” he said slowly, finally turning towards her.  She shifted as well until the two sat face to face.

“They will never understand why or how.  This piece of stone will crumble eventually, and we will only be the ghosts of old stories that barely held any truth to begin with.”

“We’ll remember.  As long as it takes, we’ll remember.” 

“That may be a very long time, Captain.”

His mouth quirked in a smile that was equal parts fond and bitter.

“It’s been decades, Natasha.  I don’t think calling me by my name will undermine the chain of command at this point.”

She shrugged gracefully and gazed back at the monument.

“Call me sentimental.”

He laughed and smiled, freely this time, before nudging her shoulder with his own.

“They’d have hated this thing, wouldn’t they?” he asked between quiet chuckles.

“Clint always said they’d put up statues of him over his dead body.  He didn’t think Phil would actually be able to get the city to promise they’d wait until we were all gone.”

“Except for us, you mean.”

“Steve, look around you – we are gone.”

“Yeah, I guess we are.”

“We had good years together.  There is no shame in missing them.  But you and I must move on to something new.”

“But we’ll take the stories with us.”

“Yes, the stories are ours now.  Ours to pass on, ours to remember.”

 

_It’s been years since we carved our names on a clock tower door before everything changed.  We were big eyed boys with the salt on our skin, and we’d throw our kites to the wind._

_And in years, when the torchlight thins, and the clock tower’s gone, and the big light dims, we’ll no longer be boys, we’ll have lines on our skin, and they’ll throw our dust to the wind._

 

###### Chapter inspired by "Circles" from Passenger.


	2. We Carry on Our Backs the Burdens Time Cannot Erase

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil Coulson has an identical twin brother.
> 
> OR
> 
> How Phil Coulson met Nick Fury, joined SHIELD, and eventually came to recruit Clint Barton.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No real warnings this chapter other than reference to battlefield injuries.

Among certain SHIELD personnel, it is common knowledge that Clint Barton has a brother.  Criminal relatives have a way of making their way into the employment files of former-assassins-turned-sensitive-government-operatives.  Especially when the last family dinner ended almost twenty years previously in an attempted assassination (of your operative) and the beginning of said operative’s illustrious career.  So despite the fact that nobody dares mention it, there are a number of highly ranked SHIELD agents who knew the details of Clint’s only living family.

Only two SHIELD agents know that Phil Coulson has a twin brother.  One reason for this is simple – brothers with no education beyond a GED and a twenty-five year career at a small auto repair shop rarely find their ways into standard employment files.  At best they are included in a supplement chronicling every moment from birth until recruitment by SHIELD.  At worst, they are relegated to a footnote containing family census data.

Both Clint Barton and Nick Fury have met Ed Coulson – neither introduction went particularly well.  Of course, no one really expected it to. 

* * *

 

It takes five years of working together after Clint is recruited to SHIELD before Phil tells him the story of how a young Phil Coulson, valedictorian of his graduating class in high school and recipient of numerous college scholarship offers, enlisted in the military at 18, met Nick Fury, and became the “one good eye” of that singularly terrifying man.  If asked previously, Client would probably have blamed it on the Captain America obsession.  In a way, he’d be right.

* * *

 

When they are seventeen, Phil and Ed Coulson are not best friends, but they are brothers.  Ed makes sure that his teammates on the football, track, and wrestling teams don’t bother Phil like they do most of the other smart, quiet kids and Phil makes sure that Ed’s turning in decent homework every day.  Ed thinks Phil needs to let go of his Captain America obsession, but since they no longer share a room he doesn’t complain about it anymore than necessary to maintain his image.  Phil thinks that Ed should probably put more thought into his 10 year plan than “get some bitchin’ degree and make a ton of money,” but it’s not his future so he lets it go (other than occasionally leaving brochures about decent applied degrees on the dinner table in plain sight). 

Then it is their junior year of high school and the school announces that any student wanting to go to college will need to register for and take the SAT.  Phil is unsurprised – he has been studying for this test for months and knows he will do well.  He needs a good score to get scholarships that will allow him to go to a really good school.  He wants to be a lawyer so he can join the fight for justice for those who can’t fight for themselves, and he knows that his family could not afford any of the required degrees.  Ed tries not to think about the test until Phil pesters him into the required pre-registration.  He is still adamant that he will go to college and make enough money to buy their parents a nice new house and get a flashy car he can show off to his friends.  He does not study.

Phil will never know when Ed realizes that he is not going to be able to achieve his goal with the reality in front of him.  All that he will ever know for sure is that on the morning of the test when he double checks his shiny new driver’s license before handing it over to the bored-looking woman checking in students, the name no longer reads Phillip J. Coulson.  He could not know that his panicked response in that moment would change the course of an entire family.  He could not know that his stammered explanation that “No, Phil Coulson did _not_ already check in!” would mean nothing would ever be the same again. 

For years, when he thinks about that day, all he will remember is the school principal leading Ed into his office from where he is already seated in a testing room, his parents arriving and his mother breaking into sobs when she passes him, and the tight set of his father’s mouth when he tells Phil (after Phil returns from taking the test) that his brother has been expelled and will not be finishing high school.

When the envelope with the SAT logo arrives, Phil throws it into the trash without opening it to see that he had gotten almost the highest possible score.

No one ever says that they blame Phil for what happened.  (No one ever says they don’t, either.)

* * *

By the time he met Clint Barton, Phil Coulson had completed programs for undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate degrees in several fields under various aliases – including his own.  Those degrees had been some of the last to be earned, though his family would never be aware of that fact.  Although Nick had always suspected as much, only Clint ever knew for certain that Phil had pretended the degrees actually earned in his name were just another op that he needed to complete.  Phil murmured the truth in the dark of their bedroom and into the back of Clint’s neck as he held him, explaining that in a way they had been just another cover, this time for his family to explain what he was doing with his life after the “medical discharge” that removed him from Special Forces. 

Clint – being Clint – never needed to ask why Phil had never responded to the increasingly desperate teachers and college administrators who shifted inexorably from commiserating, to cajoling, to begging, to bitterness as he failed to live up to their expectations.  He also never asked what it must have felt like to pack his bags for basic training instead of freshman orientation and never have his parents sit him down and talk about the choices he was making.

(Objectively, their other son had already moved out and had a steady paycheck and an employer who insisted he get a GED or get his damn ass fired, so perhaps a reasonable person wouldn’t have asked either.  Honestly, Clint’s parents, even while alive, had stopped asking after their sons’ life choices around the time Barney forced Clint to eat almost an ounce of stale modeling clay at the age of three, so it wasn’t like he was in a position to judge.)

* * *

 

Phil would never tell anyone what happened the day he skipped school to go to the recruiting office.  He had been prepared for incredulity, for more confusion and questions about why he was “throwing away his future” (according to every teacher he had ever met).  He was even prepared for boredom or ridicule. 

Nothing could have prepared him for a serious young man with a cast on his left leg, his right arm in a sling, and a thick bandage wrapped around his head and covering his left eye.  Phil knew he couldn’t stop staring, but the man only pulled the corner of his mouth up into a smirk and ignored him as he read Phil’s transcripts and application materials.

“So, you think you wanna be in the Army, son?”

Phil ignored that the man couldn’t be more than 10-15 years older than him and looked him straight in his uncovered eye – “Yes, sir.”

“And you don’t care that you could end up like this?”

“No, sir.”

“You prepared to die for your country?”

“If I have to, sir.”

“You some kind of Captain America wannabe?”

“Something like that, sir.”

The man kept his eye somehow trained on both of Phil’s and studied him in silence for a moment.

“You wanna tell me what you’re running from, kid?”

Phil stared straight back at him.

“Not particularly, sir.”

“All right, then.  Something tells me you already know about the medical exams and what comes next.  You pass and make it to basic, we’ll see what happens.”

It was almost a year later that Phil Coulson found himself one of the youngest recruits to a Ranger team led by one of the youngest commanding officers ever given a team.

Nick Fury and Phil Coulson faced each other across a supply of weapons that could destroy a small country, neither speaking.  The bandage had been replaced by an eye patch and not a trace remained of the older man’s limp.  The younger man had filled out into broad shoulders and a confident stance.  When the silence broke, the older man’s tone was amiable but solemn.

“I don’t care what you’re running from, son.  All I care about is that you run when I tell you and you keep running as long as I ask.  Think you can do that?”

“Yes, sir.  I think I can do that.”

* * *

 

Years later, Phil Coulson would face down a cornered assassin who had spent years running from a brother he felt he had betrayed.  Lowering his weapon, he stepped forward and looked the young man dead in the eyes.

“I don’t care what you’re running from, son.  All I care is that you run when I tell you and you keep running as long as I ask.  You think you can do that, everything will be ok.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter inspired by "Fallen" from Sarah McLachlan.


End file.
